They Were Divided
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Product Description
Product Description
A Hungarian classic and winner of the 2002 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, They Were Divided reflects the rapidly disintegrating course of events in central Europe on the eve of WWI. In the foreground, it tells the story of Balint and his flawed cousin, Laszlo Gyeroffy, told with humour and bittersweet nostalgia for a paradise lost through folly. In the background, the sinister and fast-moving events in the Balkans eventually not only lead to a horrific war, but also to the complete dismemberment of their once-great country.
About the Author
Count Miklos Banffy (1873-1950) lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida in Transylvania or in the family's town house in Pest. Banffy was variously a diplomat, MP and a foreign minister in the 1921/22 when he signed the peace treaty with the United States and obtained Hungary's admission to the League of Nations. He was responsible for organizing the last Habsburg coronation, that of King Karl in 1916. His famous Transylvanian Trilogy, of which They Were Divided forms the third part, was published just before the Second World War. It was ignored under the communists, and has recently been republished to great acclaim in his native country and in the UK and France.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have just finished reading this excellent novel, which I thoroughly recommend, but you must first read its equally brilliant predecessors, 'They Were Counted' and 'They Were Found Wanting'.
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I read the entire trilogy of Miklos Banfy's history of the turn of the century in what was, variously, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia etc., with continually moving borders. It was incredibly evocative of an era long gone, the pre WWI central Europe, the politics, the great estates, the social whirls, the loves and the hatreds, the competing kingdoms and families...absolutely riveting. A major achievement.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A Veil of Sadness
2 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback
This last volume of the Transylvanian trilogy is so ineffably sad that it is difficult for me to pen a review of it. Of course, one knew this was coming to pass from the previous two volumes as well as by a knowledge of world history. But, for all that, the tone of the book is such that the reader, along with Count Balint Abady, Miklós Bánffy's alter ego, can't help feel that he/she has lost both true love and home by the end of the reading of it. The piquant tone of the book is set in the first chapter here, where Abady, contemplating his return to the family estate, Denestornya, reflects: "My home, he thought, with its age-old beauty and magic, where, though always enveloped in a veil of sadness, there were only the two of them to wander in that enormous house: he and his old mother."
Aside from the lush descriptions of his beloved home and the doomed idyll he enjoys with the love of his life, Adrienne, there is also a great deal of what I suppose one would call "political philosophy" today, but which in Bánffy's account here, comes across as more of a cri de coeur against the follies of the European death-wish moving inexorably across the diplomatic landscape:
"Hereditary power is only possible when it rules a society that is itself built up in layers whose traditional apex is the Crown. There is nothing logical in this. It is a historical and emotional acceptance of an illogical fact; that is all. The monarch who turns demagogue and who puts himself at the head of popular revolutionary movements may fancy that he's feathering his own nest, but what he's really doing is preparing the way for a republic, or for the ruin of his own country!"
And, of course, ruin is what is nigh at hand.
The trilogy, as a whole, is full of beautifully rendered passages describing this lost world and the characters and the society - the ethos - which comprise it, completely disarming and enchanting the reader and filling him/her with the deep sadness of life. The trilogy, if classifiable, is a Romantic (capital "R") tragedy, but one based on actual events through which the author has lived. There is not much whimsy to be found, especially in this last volume. I'll close this review with one such moving passage from this last book:
"It was a glorious starlit night with the countless stars of heaven shining brightly in the dark sky. He thought he had never seen so many, and the Milky Way was like a vast river of light, its darker patches like islands, that wound its way from one horizon to the other. The great constellations were like letters of fire in the sky and, in Balint's imagination, seemed to be making their way ever closer to him so as eventually to disclose some ageless secret message even to that worm-like creature that was man, the secret, perhaps, of life and death...and of eternity..."
As Balint feels of the constellations, so one feels turning the pages of these books; there is something eternal in them.
Aside from the lush descriptions of his beloved home and the doomed idyll he enjoys with the love of his life, Adrienne, there is also a great deal of what I suppose one would call "political philosophy" today, but which in Bánffy's account here, comes across as more of a cri de coeur against the follies of the European death-wish moving inexorably across the diplomatic landscape:
"Hereditary power is only possible when it rules a society that is itself built up in layers whose traditional apex is the Crown. There is nothing logical in this. It is a historical and emotional acceptance of an illogical fact; that is all. The monarch who turns demagogue and who puts himself at the head of popular revolutionary movements may fancy that he's feathering his own nest, but what he's really doing is preparing the way for a republic, or for the ruin of his own country!"
And, of course, ruin is what is nigh at hand.
The trilogy, as a whole, is full of beautifully rendered passages describing this lost world and the characters and the society - the ethos - which comprise it, completely disarming and enchanting the reader and filling him/her with the deep sadness of life. The trilogy, if classifiable, is a Romantic (capital "R") tragedy, but one based on actual events through which the author has lived. There is not much whimsy to be found, especially in this last volume. I'll close this review with one such moving passage from this last book:
"It was a glorious starlit night with the countless stars of heaven shining brightly in the dark sky. He thought he had never seen so many, and the Milky Way was like a vast river of light, its darker patches like islands, that wound its way from one horizon to the other. The great constellations were like letters of fire in the sky and, in Balint's imagination, seemed to be making their way ever closer to him so as eventually to disclose some ageless secret message even to that worm-like creature that was man, the secret, perhaps, of life and death...and of eternity..."
As Balint feels of the constellations, so one feels turning the pages of these books; there is something eternal in them.
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